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Wednesday, 19 February 2014

Somnath Bharti - porn site operator?

I seem to have written a lot about Somnath Bharti lately, and he's certainly a topic of interest in Indian politics. I'm not going to go on about his links to TopSites LLC (watch the video if you are interested), but I wanted to look at these persistent comments that Somnath Bharti was some sort of porn site operator.

If you want the really short version it's this - I've never seen any evidence that Mr Bharti has owned or operated a porn site. That's it.

But allwebhunt.com also linked to more regular porn sites, including the examples pictured below.

These entries appeared to be paid or sponsored ones, but the sites themselves are not Mr Bharti's and it does amuse me that some of the India news outlets criticising Mr Bharti for this do exactly the same things themselves.

Ultimately, allwebhut.com (and its predecessor topsites.us) directories are simply a catalogue of available sites, some of those links may be questionable but they do not imply ownership or mean that anything illegal is happening.

Ownership of teens-boy.net

One of the sites that Mr Bharti owned was teens-boy.net, according to historical WHOS records from 2005:

teens-boy.net had been a gay porn site until late 2004 as it appears in the Internet Archive [link is probably not safe for work]. The Internet Archive does not have any pictures on it in this case, but it is clear what the site is about by looking at the text.

It's an odd site for Mr Bharti to have in his name. But what did it actually look like after he bought it? The Internet Archive gives the answer again [this link is OK]. We can see that it just acts as a redirector to dirs.org which is yet another clone of the TopSites directory.

I guess this might have been an attempt at SEO, the domain was bought with a lot of other non-porn domains which also forwarded in this way. As far as I can tell, when the domain registration was up the domain simply expired at the end of 2005, it was re-registered by an unrelated party in 2007.

DVLPMNT MARKETING, INC and www-goto.com confusion

Webnewswire.com ran a story looking at the WHOIS details of www-goto.com, a site that had been registered to Mr Bharti in 2005:

The creation date for the domain is still 2004, so the domain has never dropped and been reregistered, it has been in continual existence since that date. The rather mysterious DVLPMNT MARKETING, INC certainly does seem to be connected with porn domains, but is this company controlled by Mr Bharti? No.

A look at the historical WHOIS details again yield some clues. The domain expired in 2008 and ended up being controlled by the registrar DirectNIC..

DirectNIC reserve the right to auction off expired domains and the next WHOIS entry sees the domain being controlled by a domain parking company. It is unlikely that Mr Bharti or any of his associates received anything for this domain, it was essentially scrapped.

Is there any other evidence linking Somnath Bharti to porn?

Over the past couple of weeks I have re-examined the TopSites LLC business plus Mr Bharti's own Madgen Solutions from my own records and other public sources. These revealed all sort of interesting facts and allegations about Mr Bharti's activities.. but absolutely nothing that suggest that he owned or operated porn sites.

Of course, perhaps there is evidence that I am not aware of, but I would be very surprised if there is.. you can always send me an email if you have anything that will prove me wrong.